An alternative way to use the functional extension is --brV+ x, where x is the average bitrate (for a variety of pop music) you want to use. You can use for instance --brV+ 224 instead of -V2+.

What is it good for?

Lameís moderate VBR quality settings like -V5 or -V4 usually yield a very good quality. Thatís why many users are happy with these settings. Sometimes however tracks contain spots which are not encoded well. Many users want a better quality also for these rather rare events. From current experience Lame3.100 alpha2 seems to scale well quality of tonal problems with -Vn level, but temporal resolution can still be an issue.

-Vn+ uses -Vn as the encoding basis, but adds a certain amount of brute-force safety by forcing audio data bitrate to a target bitrate which depends on -Vn+ level. Moreover care is taken to always provide maximum possible audio data space for the encoding of short blocks which are used when the encoder thinks it is appropriate for a good temporal resolution. Also Lame's default lowpass is lowered a bit in order to make best use of the encoded bits (use --lowpass x if you don't like this).

Emphasis is on issues with temporal resolution, but tonal problems are tackled as well.

In a sense -Vn+ combines the quality advantages of both VBR and CBR.

Recommendations

Users who care much about filesize and are content with the functional extension improving short block (pre-echo) behavior, can use -V5+ to -V4+.

Users who donít like rather obvious issues in their music even when theyíre rare but who also care about filesize are best to choose from -V3.5+ to -V1.5+ according to their needs.For a significant potential for improving tonal issues -V3+ or better is recommended.

Users who donít care much about filesize but much more about universal top quality are best served by using -V1+ or V0+, or anything in between.

lame3100h.exe uses the fast and lossless mp3packer tool internally to squeeze the otherwise unused bits out of the mp3 file. You can download mp3packer from http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....st&p=282289. Put mp3packer.exe into the same folder where lame3100h.exe is located. Many thanks to Omion for this great tool.In case there is no mp3packer.exe in lame3100h.exeís folder lame3100h.exe will work, but the mp3 files will be somewhat larger than necessary.

Thanks for testing. But wouldn't it be a good idea to first test those tracks you were not totally happy with when using 3.99.5 -V0 before going to encode a huge collection with this prerelease version?

The SSE2 result must be necessarily different from the non-SSE2 one due to the different arithmetics. Not bad per se, but as I wrote my experience isn't a good one.At least on my system the non-SSE2 version is not very much slower, something like ~145x (non-SSE2) against ~190x (SSE2) according to foobar.

Thanks for testing. But wouldn't it be a good idea to first test those tracks you were not totally happy with when using 3.99.5 -V0 before going to encode a huge collection with this prerelease version?

The SSE2 result must be necessarily different from the non-SSE2 one due to the different arithmetics. Not bad per se, but as I wrote my experience isn't a good one.At least on my system the non-SSE2 version is not very much slower, something like ~145x (non-SSE2) against ~190x (SSE2) according to foobar.

I did do some comparisons with tracks I'm vary familiar with. Not scientific by any means but I liked what I heard or maybe thought I heard. My general observations don't really fit into the scientific nature of this forum.

Your right the difference isn't that large between your i versions. I don't know what version I was comparing it to, I've been tossing in different lame.exe files left and right this AM. That said a 33% increase in performance does add up when dealing with my volume of tracks.